63. Seeing Through His Trick

Seeing Through His Trick

This time, my punches and kicks against his back did little more than make his body sway.

It took me a few seconds to realize he was laughing silently.

The bastard was laughing at me.

He stood and shook me off as if I weighed nothing, which, at our level of strength, was almost true.

He tried to grab me again.

I teleported beside him and avoided it.

He reached again.

I jumped away again.

Again and again, with shorter and shorter intervals.

My body might have been battered, and I might not have recovered to full strength, but I was not only brute force.

In and out of battle, power and mobility had far more uses than simple trading of blows.

This time?

I was only returning his mockery with interest.

In my current condition, I might not be able to seriously injure him.

But he?

Without an ambush, he could not lay a finger on me.

He understood my meaning. He tried to move faster, his angry roar growing louder, every motion turning more and more ragged as he lost patience and the control he had always loved imposing on others.

Neither of us spoke.

In a real fight, talking was a waste of time and attention when you could make your contempt clear with action…

Or simply ignore the other person completely.

I chose the latter.

My smile grew wider as I watched his scowl deepen.

Not only because it felt wonderful.

Also because it bought me time.

With every passing second, my regeneration worked faster than his.

And I became a little stronger, a little faster, my powers operating better and more efficiently.

After I knocked the gun-shaped weapon from his hand and it remained lost through a full minute of the following melee, the axe reappeared.

He had only one good arm to wield it with, which slowed him somewhat.

He also attacked with the side of the axe and its haft instead of cutting with the blade, presumably to evade my Focused Invulnerability.

But that made the axe an awkward weapon, especially given our difference in reach.

I exploited Spatial Distortion ruthlessly, changing the distance between us second by second.

Most of his swings missed. The ones that connected were not pleasant, but as the fight continued, Enhanced Regeneration kept up better and better.

Then, suddenly, I stumbled in flight.

The rhythm of the battle slowed at a moment I had not expected.

I had planned to slip past his backhanded axe swing, but instead I failed to dodge and struck the old man’s chest because I had overcommitted.

I ran straight into the edge of the blade.

The blade actually bit into my side.

That was the second surprise.

It pierced my suit and skin, cutting painfully, shallowly into muscle.

Then the axe rose again, almost maddeningly slow, hanging above me like a twisted sword of Damocles.

It came down.

Spatial Jump… failed.

At the last instant, I barely twisted aside, saving my head from actually being cut off.

I paid for it.

The axe struck my collarbone with the force of a tank cannon, carried me backward until my back slammed into the ground, and pinned me between bedrock and sharpened steel.

Superpowered metal forged by superpower and driven by superpower cut into bone…

Then stopped.

Somehow, I was not split in half.

I frowned, shaking off the mismatch between reality and expectation just as the bastard erupted again in red fury.

I crossed my arms to block his downward strike.

The axe bit into me painfully again, but not nearly as deep as I had expected.

Temporal Jump failed too.

By the time I thought to simply roll away, a huge boot crashed onto my leg with a final-sounding crack, pinning it in place.

Have you ever been in a car crash?

One of those fast accidents that could have ended very badly, but somehow you walk away with nothing worse than bruises?

I know how psychologically unpleasant that can be, even when you are lucky enough not to be badly hurt.

Adrenaline floods you, not in the Hollywood “my life flashed before my eyes” way, but in the sense that every second stretches under the crushing force of fight-or-flight instinct while you are not actually able to think.

Your brain does not work properly. Your body reacts only on instinct. And even after the emergency is over, you cannot act normally for a while.

When the axe fell for the fourth time, that same feeling washed through me.

This time, however, it was only a shallow wave breaking over a calm, clear core of thought.

Only one or two seconds had passed since things had gone bad, but my mind and senses had already recorded everything and reached conclusions.

Fact one: My speed had suddenly and inexplicably changed just as the bastard slowed down.

Fact two: His bare-handed attacks had shaken me badly before, yet now I had not been chopped into pieces.

Fact three: Several of my newly acquired powers had abruptly failed.

As reality snapped back into place with supernatural clarity, all confusion vanished.

I acted.

The axe came down.

Both my hands rose to meet it.

Not to block.

Using the difference in speed, I caught the haft just below the axe head and braced hard.

I had already noticed that the old man was significantly stronger than me.

Now, with supernatural rage strengthening him, I stopped his weapon cold with almost no struggle.

“What?” he roared, disgusting saliva dripping from his face.

“You thought I wouldn’t notice?”

Proximal Manipulation lifted me off the ground and unbalanced him.

“Nice trick, being able to shut down some of my powers whenever you want.”

Then Proximal Manipulation started me spinning, dragging him with me.

With every rotation, our momentum increased. Faster and faster, until everything around us blurred, until his legs broke the sound barrier and the air tore open with a crack, until the rushing wind shredded his clothes to rags.

“You have a cheap little trick of your own, and you still hate when other people use cheap little tricks. Hypocrite.”

“I expected that from you. What was stupid was thinking I wouldn’t see through it. You can weaken my strength enhancement, but you can’t weaken my perception.”

I used Proximal Manipulation to make our touching bodies conduct my voice, forcing him to hear me.

He had no way to answer.

He also lacked flight, or he would have used it already while I kept slipping out of his reach.

When Force Adjustment vanished again, he stubbornly kept holding on, but the damage had already been done.

We were both in the air. He had no leverage. And because I was the axis of rotation, he endured far more centrifugal force than I did.

The ability-freezing effect changed again.

As Proximal Manipulation disappeared, we began to fall and slow down, but Force Adjustment returned.

Most importantly, magic was fair, no matter how unfair it looked at first.

He could not be that much stronger than me.

His power was built around negating the enemy’s strongest abilities, but he could not negate all of mine.

In practice, against my strongest powers, he could shut down only one at a time…

And I had several.

Force Adjustment nearly eliminated the friction between him and the axe.

His grip was already bad.

Now the axe shot away like a rocket.